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Hungry for It!

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This is a great post that I think says a lot about manager/employee relations in much of UK management.

Personal Assistants and secretaries marching in the streets to demand the opportunity to

  • unleash their potential at work;
  • make progress not coffee;
  • be recognised as ‘career girls not cover girls’ and as ‘office heroes’.

It captures what the Progressive Managers Network is all about – developing managers that provide these iopportunites all of the time toevery one on the team.

All power to their elbow!

Things To Do To Develop Teamwork

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I have recently been doing a some work with managers to help them learn how to coach their staff to improve performance. One of the most common topics for coaching was team working. Several managers came up with variations of “I wish I could help so-and-so to be more of a team player.” But few have any idea where to start – other then perhaps providing some team building training. Typically they have started to talk about the need to be more of a team player – but with few positive results.

In helping managers to work out how to coach someone to be a better team player I have found that the first step is to help them to define exactly what behaviours they see (or don’t see) that lead them to draw the inference that so-and-so is not a team-player. I ask them;

“What is it that you see this person do that makes you think they are not a team player?”

This usually releases a whole list of things such as:

  • They often interrupt others in meetings
  • They often don’t listen to other peoples suggestions
  • They say they will do something and then they don’t deliver
  • If they don’t get their way then they don’t get behind the decision.

Making this step from a label (poor team player) to a set of behaviours is the essential key to making progress. They can use feedback around specific behaviours to discourage behaviours that aren’t working – and to encourage those that are.

They can develop SMART goals for coaching that will help them to learn new behaviours and habits that are more conducive to team working. We can coach them to behave differently in key team working contexts. An examples of a SMART goal that I have used in coaching people around this topic is:

“Within 6 weeks at least 2 different managers will mention to me your effectiveness in supporting the work of the team.”

Then, by using coaching and feedback to influence specific behaviours it is possible to significantly improve team working within weeks.

Practical Coaching for Managers

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Coach

I have been working over the last week or so on delivering my Practical Coaching workshop. It is designed to help managers to coach every team member to improve performance on a weekly basis. It should get some real momentum behind professional development, personal development and performance improvement.

Like most of my training the emphasis is put less on ‘coaching skills’ and more on an effective, systematic, replicable coaching process.

Judging by the initial repsonse the approach has been well received. Much of the training focuses on helping managers to agree SMART objectives for coaching that will ensure real clarity about what is going to be learned – and how a success will be judged.

We did this in a few case study examples that were supplied by participants and had some fun turning some pretty vague coaching aims (I want to coach them to be more confident/decisive; I want to coach them to be less needy of me as their manager etc) into SMART coaching objectives.

By turning these into SMART goals and then developing resources for learning, building action plans and looking at weekly progress reviews, participants were able to see some very practical ways that they could approach coaching their team members – without the need for (usually expensively acquired) ‘coaching skills’.

As always the work on SMART objectives flushed out some interesting variations on the acronym. Is the A for Achievable? The R for Realistic? If so, then what is the difference? The formulation that I encourage participants to use is:

  1. Specific – what exactly do you want them to learn to do
  2. Measurable – how will you know – absolutely whether they have met the standard that you expect
  3. Actionable – is the objective ‘dripping’ with potential actions – is it full of ‘things to do’?
  4. Relevant – where does this objective fit with their personal and professional development? Where does it fit with the needs of the business?
  5. Time related – have we got a clear time commitment – by which the goal will be achieved?

Being able top convert a vague coaching aim into a SMART coaching objective is certainly more than half the battle. After that it just requires lots of feedback and a bit of discipline to manage weekly checks on the team members progress.

This way a manager can coach every member of their team, every week and deliver real performance improvement in the organisation – without spending fortunes on external coaches.

Sounds like a winning recipe to me!

Communication: Companies need less . . . not more!

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This is the title of a great post on the Slow Leadership blog. Dave Woods says:

‘I work with a large variety of CEOs, senior managers and key employees. If I ask about the needs and issues within the company, I almost always get the same response: “We need more communication.”

My reaction to that is that it is simply, WRONG!

Companies don’t need more communication. They need more clarity.

  • Clarity of the vision of the company.
  • Clarity of where the company is going (long term and short term).
  • Clarity of HOW the company will get there.
  • Clarity of individual roles and how those roles create value toward the vision.
  • Clarity of how roles must intertwine in order to achieve extraordinary results.
  • Clarity of how the company will hold itself and each individual accountable.’

Dave then goes on to argue that if you look at a great sports team they actually need very little communication from the coach. They know all the plays and they know what they have to do. In short they have clarity. Dave argues that it is not communication that we should be increasing – but clarity.

Amen to that!

However clarity only comes with communication that is frequent, 2 way and relevant to both player and coach; employee and manager. Surely there can be no clarity without communication?

When you watch a great team play what you are seeing is the result of dozens of hours of communication, practice, feedback, delegation and coaching. Typically tens of hours of this ‘management’ go into every hour of play.

Life in most businesses is not like that. There is no practice ground. It is always ‘game time’. And most managers find it incredibly difficult to pull players out of the game to them at all whether to clarify, give feedback, coach or delegate. It is all they can do to keep playing the game – never mind improve.

So I disagree with Dave – and agree with his clients. Most organisations do need more communication. But it has to be effective. It has to focus on performance and improvement. It has to be constructive. It has to keep both vision and values in the front of people minds. And it has to be frequent.

Sounds just like a recipe for 121s to me!

You Are a Superstar: 90% of Managers Are In the Top 10%

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This from the ‘business pundit‘ blog recently:

″A new study shows that 90% of managers think they are in the top 10% at their workplace.

Believe you’re among the top performers in your office? You’re not alone.

According to a new survey, an impossible 90 percent of managers think they’re among the top 10 percent of performers at their workplace.

The number is highest among executives, 97 percent of whom consider themselves shining stars, according to a recent survey in BusinessWeek magazine.”

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The sad truth is just how easy it is for most people to get into the top 10% of managers in just about any organisation.

By consistently doing some management basics such as:

  • communicating well (that’s listening as well as telling),
  • providing feedback,
  • coaching every team member – every week,
  • running effective (as opposed to frequent) meetings
  • delegating, and
  • keeping mission, vision and values in the front of every team members thoughts…

the vast majority of managers can massively improve their effectiveness and really stand out as high performers.

It is not about charisma, vision or flair.  It not about MBAs, strategy, long hours and inspiration.

It is about consistently doing the basics well.